I. Field
This disclosure relates to expert systems and other information processing apparatuses and methods.
II. Background
An expert system can be described as a program or system that contains some subject-specific knowledge and emulates human reasoning. Typically, expert systems include a user interface, a knowledge base, an inference engine and a data base. The user interface provides a portal for a user to interact with the expert system; the data base feeds data to the expert system; the knowledge base contains the rules that control the reasoning process; and the inference engine itself processes the rules inside the knowledge base to emulate reasoning.
An example of an expert system might be a banking system configured to process loan applications. After an applicant files a loan application, the data from the loan application can be fed to the knowledge base, where rules embedded within the expert system could determine the applicant's credit worthiness.
In existing systems, knowledge bases tend to be hard-coded such that rules are static, somewhat inflexible and cannot easily be changed. To be changed, a programmer may need to edit the knowledge base in such a way that the previous knowledge base may or may not be valid anymore. In addition, expert systems may also be limiting in that their knowledge bases may contain information necessary to resolve an issue, but are expressed in a way that the inference engine cannot process efficiently if at all. Accordingly, it may be desirable to develop new technologies that can expand the capacities of expert systems.